Of course, Spectravideo’s BASIC being a Microsoft product, this meant that the interpreter was notoriously easy to use, and notoriously insecure. Or deliberately “exposing” the “dangers” of open source. Or something like that.

Specifically, the interpreter helpfully labelled all function keys, so that even the other family member who doesn’t really know all this computer programming stuff guessed that list command, on F4, shows the program listing. With a little bit of figuring out, they could find the part where the password is asked, and find the password from the program listing. Password found. Game on.

So one day, this other family member was showing the game to some
other people. Of course, I had changed the password, so the game
didn’t run. Never worry, just look at the listing… though that
probably turned out to be far more puzzling this time.

…raw source code is here, in case you have VB.NET and you’re curious
if this still compiles:

It appears that my programming style had no consistency at the time;
the spacing is pretty confusing. Now, with a couple of decades more
worth of programming experience, I’m also aware that security through
obscurity isn’t probably the best possible strategy, but it did work
at the time. Too bad I had saved an unprotected version on the other
side of the tape and had told the said family member where this
version is available, but at least I heard an admit of defeat. Yeah,
honour-system security definitely isn’t a good idea either. Or
security measures that basically just exist to show how smart you are.

But still, this was really fun.

If you can’t read BASIC, the program basically interprets the stuff on
line 120 as ASCII codes, reads 9 characters from keyboard, and
compares them to the characters in question. So, if I just whip out
the ASCII table (I don’t have the SV-318 manual at hand, so I’ll just
pop out the OS X terminal and type “man ascii” - glad ASCII hasn’t
changed that much), the password turns out to be VICONHYVA (“VIC on
hyvä” = “VIC is good”). I suppose this was after I had gotten my
VIC-20. And again, a bit of idiocy - I have no idea why I said it’s so
good, it’s definitely not as fun as the Spectravideo… Rooting for
the underdog, I guess. I’m pretty sure it was not a case of picking a password that’s completely contrary to what I was thinking and thus throwing people off.